Come on, Andy Sachs, Pinterest is launching an AI-powered shopping assistant designed to suggest your next look. Starting Thursday and for the coming weeks and months, Pinterest users will be able to talk to the visual platform about what they are shopping or looking for. Pinterest Assistant will return with personalized recommendations based on the user’s saved collections and any pins currently on their screen, and will briefly talk about the results.
The AI assistant is intended to encourage a more conversational experience, Pinterest CEO Bill Ready said Edge. Therefore, the assistant Just accepts voice commands from users – and why the assistant will speak to users when they provide pin and product suggestions. (Audio narration cannot be turned off for now.)
The AI assistant is an optional feature that does not replace customary text search, which remains unchanged on the platform. Ready says Pinterest already uses artificial intelligence to make recommendations for users. The voice layer is a up-to-date addition to the text and image AI model. “Now we’re doing it so you can actually talk to it,” he said.
In Ready’s roughly three-year existence, the platform has “effectively become an AI-powered shopping assistant for almost 600 million of our users,” he said, more than half of whom are Gen Z. Earlier this year, the company faced criticism for allowing Slop generated by artificial intelligence flood the platform. In response, Pinterest has started labeling AI-generated images as such and launched a “tuner” feature that allows users to select categories, such as fashion or beauty, that they want to have less AI-generated content.
Ready said users are asking longer, more informative queries, which he believes indicates they want a more unstructured way to interact with the platform. For example, a Taylor Swift fan who likes to knit might not know what she’s looking for or not take the time to rewrite a vague vision, Ready said. “But when it’s a conversation, people speak completely differently than they do on a keyboard.”
Users can talk to the assistant by holding down the microphone button, which is like sending a voice note to a friend. During the demonstration to EdgePinterest’s director of AI products, Ryan Galgon, asked his assistant to suggest a fashion suggestion based on the Wimbledon poster. Images of tennis-style outfits appeared on the screen, which the assistant verbally described, before suggesting that she look for more elegant or casual ways to style them. Pinterest deliberately chose to keep the audio response concise and the description of recommended pins tiny, Galgon said. The goal is to keep the experience “truly graphics-driven,” he said.
Pinterest Assistant works based on a “multimodal” artificial intelligence model that focuses primarily on image. This means that the model can process sound, image and text, and its output is images. Ready said the core AI model is built internally based on proprietary “signal” data from users. It also includes several pre-built AI models for basic language processing.
Adult users in the U.S. can now sign up to access the beta version of the up-to-date AI feature, which the company says will be widely available over the next few weeks and months.